OutSystems frequently asked questions

OutSystems is a low-code development platform that simplifies complex development processes, allowing teams to create enterprise applications quickly while ensuring scalability and performance.

See everything you can build with the low-code technology in OutSystems by exploring the enterprise apps our customers are building.

An OutSystems developer is a skilled professional who uses the OutSystems platform to deliver enterprise applications.

Our low-code platform enables these developers to accelerate development, customize applications, and integrate the platform with other systems.

Learn the key reasons why professional developers are adopting low-code.

OutSystems was designed for a broad range of users—from professional developers to business users with little to no experience in traditional development—and is suitable for all business sizes across several industries.

OutSystems offers a visual development environment with built-in tools for integration, security, app performance, and data management. It empowers teams to focus on innovation without becoming stuck by the complexity of traditional development.

No. OutSystems is not an open-source platform.

Founded in 2001, OutSystems is a privately held company.

OutSystems was founded in 2001 by Paulo Rosado, the company Founder and Chairman of the Board.

OutSystems is used by more than 1 thousand companies from various industries. These include banking and financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, government, education, energy and utilities, and retail and wholesale.

You can take a look at what OutSystems customers are developing by reading their testimonials and stories.

OutSystems is both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

As SaaS, OutSystems provides ready-to-use development tools and environments through a subscription model, handling software updates, maintenance, and infrastructure management.

As PaaS, OutSystems provides development and deployment platform infrastructure, enables custom application development and hosting, manages underlying runtime environment, databases, and scalability.

From beginner to low-code expert, OutSystems offers an extensive ecosystem of training materials.

These include courses, hands-on tutorials, documentation, and community forums where you can ask questions and learn from experts and experienced developers.

OutSystems offers several high-quality courses, but the ones that are the most suitable for you depend on your level of experience and familiarity with our low-code platform. You can explore the OutSystems training catalog and discover all the courses available.

OutSystems technology simplifies app development and is therefore relatively easy to learn compared to coding and writing scripts.

The OutSystems platform learning curve will vary according to your background and the complexity of the apps being built.

Although OutSystems is a low-code platform, you’ll still need to master the basics if you don’t have experience coding. More experienced developers can become comfortable with the platform in a short period of time.

OutSystems has several resources available for you to start your low-code journey:

• Training and certification: With several online courses available, the OutSystems training catalog has the right materials for you to build mission-critical applications. The OutSystems Certification Program allows individuals to become certified in both knowledge and real-world projects.
• Documentation: OutSystems documentation is the right place if you’re looking for useful information to help you get started with the platform.
• Jump Start workshops: Free training sessions hosted by OutSystems experts worldwide.

You can also take a look at the resources available—from ebooks to technical white papers—or deep dive into the OutSystems Evaluation Guide.

OutSystems offers a free plan—the OutSystems Personal Edition, which allows you to try the platform and learn low-code at no cost.

You can see all the details for the free edition on the dedicated page.

The pricing plans available vary based on your organization’s needs and the complexity of the applications you want to build.

The number of users, any extra features, the type of support, hosting options, and uptime guarantees are some of the variables that impact pricing.

Visit the OutSystems pricing options and plans available

Yes. The plans can be upgraded at any time—even if you start with the free edition and want to access more features or add more users, OutSystems provides options to upgrade the plans to higher tiers.

The plans for the OutSystems low-code platform vary in the features available, compliance options, number of users, and type of applications you can build. The best way to understand which features fit each plan is to compare the options available and choose the plan that suits your organization the best.

Yes. The number of users is charged according to the plan:

• The free edition supports up to 100 users.
• OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) starts with 100 internal users.
• Advanced add-ons allow you to add internal and external users as needed.

Yes, OutSystems is a low-code platform. It’s designed to simplify and accelerate app development by providing a visual environment with drag-and-drop capabilities.

It allows developers and non-technical users to build mission-critical applications fast and efficiently.

OutSystems uses its own visual development language, but it generates HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for the user interface and SQL for database scripts. Developers can use Visual Studio to develop custom C# code and .NET frameworks.

OutSystems is a full-stack platform, meaning it covers both front-end and back-end development.

OutSystems accelerates app development through the platform’s low-code environment, which provides visual tools, pre-built components, reusable templates, integration capabilities, visual consoles for application management, and 1-click publish.

These features streamline the application development process and allow teams to deliver apps faster than with traditional development methods.

See all the platform capabilities for fast app delivery on our accelerated development page.

OutSystems low-code allows you to build a wide variety of applications, including:

• Web and mobile applications
• Intranets and extranets
• Core systems
• Customer and internal enterprise apps
• Complaint management systems
• Digital banking apps
• Digital lending solutions
• Citizen portals
• Self-service portals

See the enterprise applications our customers are building

OutSystems provides automated version control, 1-click publishing, zero-downtime updates, and impact analysis to handle application modification, new releases, and upgrades.

Automated version control tracks all changes automatically, maintains version history, and enables rollbacks if needed. 1-click publishing validates changes before deployment, handles database updates automatically, and deploys across environments (dev, test, prod). Zero-downtime means it updates applications without service interruption, maintains user sessions during updates, and automatically manages database schema changes. Impact analysis analyzes dependencies before updates, identifies potential conflicts, and shows affected components.

Yes. The OutSystems low-code platform supports both web and mobile app development—from native apps to hybrid applications.

Yes, OutSystems offers robust third-party integration capabilities as part of its low-code platform. You can understand all the options provided by taking a look at all integration capabilities overview in the Evaluation Guide.

OutSystems facilitates development collaboration through a multi-user environment. With version and source control capabilities, OutSystems stores all app versions and modules in a central repository, simplifying team collaboration.

With built-in version control that tracks app changes automatically, OutSystems allows teams to create multiple versions of the same application, roll back to previous versions, and manage different development streams.

The platform has several built-in security features that include:

• Automatic security patching and no downtime.
• App shielding features.
• OutSystems Private Gateway for easily and securely connecting applications with your infrastructure—on-premises, in private, or public cloud.
• Failover across multiple availability zones (AZs).
• Protection from SQL injection and XSS with an industry-leading web application firewall.
• OutSystems Content Delivery Network (CDN) and web application firewall (WAF) to help protect from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
• Continuous automated intrusion detection, malware scanning, and runtime integrity monitoring.
• Self-managed identity and access management customized to align with your governance model.
• Least-privilege principle to maintain the strictest possible authorizations and authentication standards.

Yes. OutSystems allows you to deploy applications across environments such as development, testing, and production. Deployments can also be managed on the platform to ensure that transitions between environments go smoothly.

Although the OutSystems platform doesn’t natively support Python, it provides integration capabilities for Python-based services through APIs and external services.

OutSystems supports databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

In OutSystems 11, user licensing is managed through the OutSystems licensing dashboard. There you can assign licenses based on the number of users, environments, and application components.

OutSystems incorporates AI capabilities to enhance the development process by:

• Generating and editing a fully functional app from a prompt or uploaded requirements document
• Providing suggestions for next steps
• Automating repetitive tasks
• Automating code quality review and validation
• Making recommendations for code optimization
• Generating and summarizing content
• Enabling semantic search

The platform also integrates AI for predictive analysis, improving user experiences, and optimizing performance.

OutSystems Mentor (previously known as Project Morpheus) uses generative AI (GenAI) and other AI capabilities to quickly build scalable, error-free, and secure apps with no coding required.

Explore its full capabilities and how to create apps faster with AI-powered OutSystems Mentor

Yes. OutSystems supports third-party integrations of AI tools through APIs and connectors. Some examples of services you can connect to are:

• Amazon Bedrock
• ChatGPT
• Azure OpenAI

Yes. OutSystems Workflows is a tool built into the OutSystems platform to automate workflows. You can also build GenAI apps with an AI toolset.

OutSystems supports GenAI integration into applications. With OutSystems AI Agent Builder, you can infuse your apps with generative AI agents that humanize digital interactions, testing them out in a “playground” before you put them into production.

The AI Agent Builder is an autonomous computer program that performs tasks without human involvement. It combines LLMs and RAG with proprietary knowledge in AI agents that leverage LLMs to prompt and respond in natural language and optimize outputs using RAG.

Explore the full capabilities of OutSystems AI Agent Builder

The platform’s AI capabilities enhance application development by:

• Streamlining complex processes like debugging
• Providing real-time security checks
• Improving overall code quality and app architecture
• Minimizing technical debt
• Automating workflows beyond business process management

Continue exploring, and take a look at the OutSystems AI capabilities for app development.

OutSystems is a low-code platform that runs on the cloud, offering cloud-native development capabilities such as microservices and container creation and management. It makes it easy and fast to build, update, and scale applications as companies modernize and grow.

OutSystems offers several deployment options:

• OutSystems Developer Cloud
• OutSystems 11 Cloud
• Public clouds: Such as AWS or Azure
• On-premises deployment: For organizations that want to install OutSystems on a third-party vendor cloud, or in a data center.

See OutSystems deployment options in detail

The platform supports vertical and horizontal scalability.

OutSystems Cloud—and the platform itself—is designed to ensure scalability by automatically scaling apps to accommodate increased workloads and fully adjust to customer requirements.

OutSystems Cloud offers several benefits, including:

• Fully managed infrastructure
• Automatic scalability
• Enhanced security
• Seamless updates
• Global reach for deployments

The platform provides built-in tools for managing and storing data in the cloud environment. It secures data with encryption and supports various data management capabilities like caching, synchronization, and modeling.

The OutSystems platform includes several performance monitoring features. These include real-time visibility, built-in KPIs, automated dashboards for monitoring application health and performance issues, third-party APM integration, and log data exports.

For more details, you can check the OutSystems App Performance Monitoring page.

Yes! OutSystems Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering high availability and robust security for applications.

The partner program is open to organizations looking to collaborate with OutSystems in delivering low-code solutions.

To become an OutSystems partner, you can apply by filling out the form available. To understand the different partnership models available and decide what fits your business needs and goals the best, you can visit the Become a Partner page.

Yes. OutSystems partners have exclusive access to the OutSystems platform along with tools and resources to help achieve business success.

These include:

• Receiving unique licensing and pricing terms
• Driving subscription revenue
• Increasing customer satisfaction through more agile and rapid application development
• Increasing the productivity and value of your development resources
• Bidding for large projects with the confidence you can meet and exceed customer expectations

From technology providers to independent software vendors and consulting firms, the OutSystems partners list includes several worldwide organizations with specialized expertise to provide industry-specific solutions, such as Xebia, Truewind (Axians), Capgemini, Fujitsu, or KPMG Advisory.

Visit our partner network

The type of certifications that OutSystems partners need depends on the type of partner. For example, OutSystems Training Partners must be certified OutSystems trainers. There are also certifications for sales and presales, along all kinds of development certifications.

For more information, visit the Become a Partner page or, if you’re already a partner, reach out to your partner manager.

Yes. With specialized training options, partners can access partner-exclusive courses, workshops, and bootcamps, while also having access to resources that support certification preparation.

The OutSystems Training Partners Program is authorized to deliver training to OutSystems partners (and customers) to accelerate the adoption of the platform. Training services are delivered worldwide.

If you’re interested in becoming a Training Partner, you can submit this form and one of our team members will reach out to you.